A new Linux driver is out and ready for download

Oct 12, 2015 19:40 GMT  ·  By

A new Nvidia Beta driver has been released, and developers have added quite a few OpenGL changes and improvements, among other things.

The Nvidia developers have just pushed a new Beta driver out the door and this time it's full of all kinds of OpenGL updates and fixes. It will be a while until all of these changes make their way onto the stable branch of the drivers, but these are pretty important, and it won't take all that long.

The biggest addition seems to be the new Linux kernel module, nvidia-modeset.ko. "This new driver component works in conjunction with the nvidia.ko kernel module to program the display engine of the GPU. nvidia-modeset.ko does not provide any new user-visible functionality or interfaces to third party applications. However, in a later release, nvidia-modeset.ko will be used as a basis for the modesetting interface provided by the kernel's direct rendering manager (DRM)," reads the official website.

According to the changelog, a regression that reduced OpenGL performance has been fixed, a memory leak that occurred after destroying a GLXWindow, a bug which caused EGL pbuffers to be created with both a front and back buffer, instead of a back buffer only, as is required for EGL, has been fixed, and a new system memory allocation mechanism for large allocations in the OpenGL driver has been added.

As usual, you can download the Nvidia 358.09 Beta Linux drivers for the 32-bit and 64-bit flavors from Softpedia. A version for FreeBSD 32-bit and 64-bit and Solaris are also available.

Nvidia 358.09 Beta Changelog